These past few weeks have seen an almost unprecedented movement in state governments across the country attacking LGBTQ+ rights in one way or another. The failed Georgia and successfully passed North Carolina and Mississippi religious liberty bills have caused widespread debate and condemnation across the country. It isn’t new; the respective “bathroom” and “wedding cake” wars have been playing out in state and local governments for the past couple years and have been evermore present since the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision last summer.
These bills revolve around myths and prejudices as crutches for support in their respective state legislatures. Baking a cake for a same-sex couple should not keep you up at night in utter regret of your religious conventions. If you want to own a business that bakes cakes, you do not get to choose who your customers are. Denying service in such a way is discrimination, pure and simple. As for bathrooms, the idea that transgender people are going to possibly rape or assault women or children in bathrooms preys on fears that weren’t even an issue before. If you can show me a case of a transgender person assaulting someone in the bathroom, I’m all ears; it hasn’t happened.
Although the bleak tone of the past couple weeks here in the U.S. has been lingering, last Friday, Pope Francis released a more hopeful tone for LGBTQ+ rights in the Roman Catholic Church. Amoris Laetitia, or The Joy of Love, is a post-Synodic apostolic exhortation that cites the need for acceptance of homosexuals and single parents in the church and having support for these groups of people who have been marginalized by the Catholic doctrine.
This writing will not change the position of the church immediately, but it is a start. The Catholic church is an institution that is slowly changing, even with a progressive pope like Francis at the helm.
These past few weeks have shown that religion is what you make it. Religion can be a tool of compassion and protection for the less fortunate, such as the church under Pope Francis, or it can be a tool to explain away the moral debt needed to continually suppress minority groups. The latter should not and cannot be the face of religion in this country or the face of this country in general.
The fact that lawmakers across the country, including some presidential candidates, use terms such as “religious liberty” to claim that the civil rights of a majority are threatened by the newly acquired rights of a minority is counter-productive and preying on people’s fears. The party that is against “big” government using its power in every aspect of daily life does not mind the government regulating bathrooms, which to party members, has become a paramount responsibility of their government.
It is time for those claiming to be the mouthpiece of the religious in our country to take a lesson from the Pope: acceptance. Religion is all about the golden rule we all learned in kindergarten: Treat people the way you would want to be treated.
This issue speaks to the greatest problem in our time of gridlock and uncompromising partisanship; there is no longer a dialogue. Republicans and Democrats no longer watch the same nightly news programs or discuss issues with each other. The country is becoming a clear duality of “us” versus “them” in which equal rights becomes a partisan issue.
Kevin Foster is a UF political science senior. His column appears on Thursdays.
